


by now it's just a scar

by mickleborger



Series: and see the sky turn bright [1]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: POV Third Person, getting a renegon sole survivor through this mission is proving more difficult than anticipated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 16:31:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11718186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: utukku, and the things that came before, and a few things that came after





	by now it's just a scar

i.

( _How did you cope, after Akuze?  
_

_I picked myself up and vowed to do better by them._ )

What Avery does not say to Ash in that dark corner of engineering is that it took weeks for them to get back up again, back up from shambling through half-duties while they recovered physically, counting ghosts like a zombie trapped on the other side of the river.  What Avery does not say is that there was nothing for a very long time after Akuze, no chase after Cerberus to bring them to justice, not even a shadow of Cerberus to be angry with.  What Avery does not say is that Jeannie had to drag them out from under the kitchen counter more than once -- Jeannie herself shining and ghost-pale, but more alive somehow than anyone else in the world, and certainly more than Avery who waited on the tile for death.  Avery does not say that though they took little time to be _functional_ again, they were not _human_ again for what might have been forever; and they do not say that even now, when the light is just right and the grass on an alien world just the right color, they can still see Blake laughing at a joke Torres made that never reached Avery’s ears, right before the churning earth swallowed them whole.

Avery does not say these things because Ash is a soldier born of soldiers, and Ash has a look in her eye like if she stops she knows she will remember the 212 with just a little too much clarity.  Avery does not say these things because they asked Jeannie the same sorts of questions about that bloodbath in Lomonosov, on the way home from the hospital, when Jeannie whose hair was still long and like a magma stream asked them how they were feeling; and Avery has not forgotten what these questions mean.

 _You okay, Skipper?_ Ash doesn’t ask, because she knows that strangely-focused look Avery has, and Tali is keeping a running count of how many medium-sized gadgets the commander has dismantled and put back together since they dropped Kirrahe’s team back off at the Citadel.

ii.

Grunt heals fast, even for a krogan, but picking a fight with fifty or so cyborg monstrosities that barely remember being rachni will turn anyone’s day more than a little sour.  He drifts in and out of consciousness on the shuttle ride back to Normandy, and does the same all his time in the medbay as they creep as swiftly as they can back to the Citadel.  When he is awake, it’s usually to chuckle in triumph, and incessantly, until Michel gets him to lie down again and he returns with apparent glee to sleep.   The fraction of Eve’s face that’s visible has an odd expression on it when she looks at him.

The receptionist at Huerta hesitates at the sight of a mauled but giggling young krogan, but that one scar on Avery’s jaw is hard to not pick at, and the look they have on their face from trying to ignore it discourages most arguments.

iii.

Jeannie finds them again on Illium, spots Avery and Garrus and a dark-haired woman she doesn’t know from across the spaceport and flashes through surprise-doubt-excitement-confusion-shock several times before she’s reached them.  This is definitely Garrus, all limbs and fangs and propped up with those same fragile supports he was using two years ago when she first met him - but half his face is missing, and she knows and hates the steel in his eyes, no matter how sincere his half-smile.

And Avery!  Avery, she would know anywhere, Avery with their hair more disheveled for how short it is now, Avery who stops their sentence short and runs into her arms and holds onto her long enough that some passerby start to stare and the dark-haired woman ( _Miranda_ , Avery calls her) has to clear her throat politely.  Miranda looks like she knows exactly who Avery married in a giddy fit of impulse after the Academy, but they introduce Jeannie anyway - deliberately, with a smirk that is very much Avery’s.

( _I died.  I got better._

 _You’ve died before.  You always do._ )

The Cerberus ship is too bright at all times, but there are a few hours where there are fewer people in the mess than usual, and Jeannie is glad to not have to explain to anyone what her interest in the main battery is.  Garrus doesn’t want to talk, but he’s more than happy to show off his new guns.  Jeannie doesn’t mind, but _what the hell have you taken to doing to your stocks, kid_.

Garrus doesn’t want to talk, but he has a lot to say.

iv.

Garrus isn’t C-Sec anymore, but C-Sec sure knows which of his friends are or are not in the hospital, and which of them decided to cannonball out of his window straight into a night of party crimes.  He lets Jeannie read Aurelius’s irate message over his elbow and they’re both surprised at how hard they laugh, and how long.  Avery, holding several receipts and citations and towing a delighted-looking Grunt, looks between them in attempted exasperation before breaking down and laughing, too.

v.

Avery spends a lot of their time on Noveria in a rage, running after rachni with their overheated pistol and screaming.  Noveria is cold and unfriendly, and between the oily ashen snow and the bug-guts their curls are totally unidentifiable as such, only as a grimy mess through which a look both mortified and furious can almost be seen.   _What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck_ , they growl, crawling out from under a bloated insectoid corpse, and Tali who helps them kick it over the ledge feels a surge of fondness for her exo-suit.   _What the fuck_ , they mutter, trying to comb some part of the gooey mess out of their hair, and Garrus who scans the back of the lab with his rifle firmly in hand has never been so acutely aware of how glad he is to not be a mammal.

 _What the fuck_ , Avery murmurs to Tartakovsky as he explains what was done to the rachni, their breath like smoke in the air and their nails digging deep into the synthetic material of their gloves.   _What the fuck_ , to the thing that speaks through Benezia and says it had meant to raise an army.   _What the f-_

Their last oath dies and flutters to the ground like an errant snowflake in the face of the mostly-dead asari and the infant queen that speaks through them -- speaks of the unseen horror that lead her mother shrieking to a war that doomed her species, of the greasy yellows and browns of a song that can barely even be heard, of a cold and mute and black eternity.   _Your musics are colorless_ , says the queen risen from the boundless grave, and Avery frowns and almost thinks _they are not; my grief is a hideous green haze, and Tali’s hand in mine the gold and pink of the dawn, and Jeannie’s laugh the twinkling blue of the star-kissed sea, and my anger all the colors of the sun_ \-- but this is not what the rachni queen means, and in the cold of the planet Avery feels a pang of something colder still, the bite of understanding that this is something wholly beyond them, some way of speaking and living and loving that is totally alien.

But what Avery does get, what is not alien to Avery, is the feeling of being cold and injured and scared and alone, surrounded by the remains of people who used to be yours.  And they remember Ekenstam’s screams beside them as the maw’s acid ate through his armor; and sometimes they feel that acid, too, on that long scar that runs down their leg, from which they haven’t felt much of anything in seven years.

( _I don’t know if I did the right thing._

_Yeah, I don’t think the Council likes being hung up on._

_Jeannie._ )

vi.

_Shit happens.  People die.  Get mad, get drunk, get over it._

Grunt is peering over the back of the couch, head wedged between Liara’s right bicep and Miranda’s left (both of them uncomfortably unaware that somewhere along the line they were named _sister_ to a test tube krogan), grinning sloppily at an unsupervised and _definitely doomed_ keg of beer.   _So you got us all out of the Collector base fine, so what?  Sometimes you luck out.  Most times you don’t._

Avery watches him scuttle toward the poor keg, slumped against the wall of Anderson’s apartment with a horrible drink Jack and Jeannie concocted and handed to them, snickering.  Grunt has recovered fast enough to alarm several C-Sec agents, all of thom have messaged an exhausted Garrus in concern.  He towers over Avery, big clawed hands around his keg, big blue eyes staring straight at where he thinks Avery’s are right now.   _They were my people, Shepard.  We knew what we were getting into._

He stomps off, not sure how to get into the keg and determined to get some assistance or die trying, and to replace him Jeannie appears behind Avery’s shoulder and plucks the nightmare cocktail out of their hand.  She glances back to Grunt who has, to the mounting terror of at least part of the room, unearthed a meat tenderizing mallet, and inhales part of her drink.  The corner of Avery’s mouth twitches.

 _You’re dedicated to overthinking, aren’t you?  At a party._ Jeannie mutters, shaking some of the grenadine-inspired abomination off her hand.

 _I’d get over it faster if I could hang up on someone_ , Avery smiles, taking the drink back and tasting it to make sure it’s as undrinkable as it looks.   _Do you think Liara knows Sparatus’s number?_

vii.

Avery will never, ever understand what the rachni mean by color when they speak of music, but somewhere in the wordnoise that spills from the mouths of more dead krogan than can be seen they think they see a flash of purple -- a bright thing, full of silver desperation, and vain blue hope, and a begging, pleading whisper of red-tinted _friend_.

 _Too injured.  Never make it out without help_ , they hear as if from years behind, and they do not reflexively scratch at their leg, and they do not nervously pick at their jaw.  Avery Shepard stands very, very still in the cold dark caves of Utukku, but they are not quite on Utukku.   _Too badly injured_ , and they feel a cruel sun shining.   _Might not make it_ , and they smell antiseptic.  A dozen krogan heads bob in unison, a dozen pairs of lifeless eyes stare, a storm of krogan voices speak as one of things krogan cannot know.  Avery, who still sees death behind their eyelids when they try to sleep, almost knows.  The purple shifts warmer unseen.

viii.

( _I should have died there.  I feel sometimes like I did._

 _But what would’ve come back in your place, then?_ )

ix.

( _I broke down and cried after Noveria, but I don’t think it was entirely for you._ )


End file.
